


In a hallway where love's never been

by thought



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Asexual Character, Canon Bisexual Character, Canon-Typical Worms (The Magnus Archives), F/F, Gerard Keay Lives, Michael lives, Multi, Nonbinary Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Other, POV Third Person Omniscient, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:33:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25210006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thought/pseuds/thought
Summary: It's just-- this:Georgie Barker looks at Jonathan Sims across the table in their favourite cafe one rainy January morning and instead of saying "I don't think this is going to work," she says "I think we should take a break."
Relationships: Georgie Barker/Gerard Keay/Jonathan Sims (implied), Georgie Barker/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Georgie Barker/Melanie King (bacckground), Helen/Melanie King (background)
Comments: 30
Kudos: 134





	In a hallway where love's never been

**Author's Note:**

> This is spectacularly self-indulgent and I wrote it all in one sitting immediately after what has been a fantastically stressful week, and it's the most words I've written at one time in quite possibly years. No beta, so when you see the inevitable typos I just want you to imagine me with a large glass of gin hunched over my computer typing frantically for three hours straight.

It's just-- this:

Georgie Barker looks at Jonathan Sims across the table in their favourite cafe one rainy January morning and instead of saying "I don't think this is going to work," she says "I think we should take a break."

When she says it, she's trying to be kind. She means, "I don't think this is going to work," but Jon is huddled in one of her jumpers with his chin tucked down like some sort of burrowing creature. His hands around his paper cup are shaking very slightly, and he's gone all blank and distant like nothing can touch him, and it's not like she can turn off caring about a person. So she tries to be kind. Ease him into it.

In one world, she ends things there and then, and neither of them speak beyond the required logistics of separating one life into two for eight years. In one world, two proud people who have been conditioned to equate any error in judgement with a fundamental flaw in their very being walk away from each other and refuse to look back. But in this world, their break lasts two weeks before they both realize that the weight lifted from their shoulders is not worth the hollowness in their stomachs or the absence of the stability that comes from being known.

Jon's grandmother may know the sound of his parents' voices but she does not know his dress size or his favourite brand of cigarettes. Georgie's friends may know her class schedule and her cat's name but they don't know her favourite Star trek captain or the ever-present ache in her knee from a basketball injury from when she was twelve.

"Well," says Jon. "We've had our break."

"Yes," says Georgie. "Good thing, too. Nothing wrong with a bit of time to clear our heads."

"Definitely," says Jon. "Glad we could both be reasonable about it all."

Jon settles back in their flat like he'd never left, coffee so strong it makes her sick in the mornings and careful, cold hands tugging her tie straight before she goes out, the familiar smell of cigarettes and ink that clings to everything he wears. She never asks where he'd gone for those two weeks. He never tells her. They adopt a cat the day after their "break" is over and curled up on their shitty mattress under a pile of blankets with Jon's head on her shoulder and The admiral purring furiously against her neck, Georgie feels for the first time like she is exactly where she wants to be.

They still fight, if you can call it that. Of course they do. Quiet and bitterly passive aggressive because Jon has always known that to draw attention to himself is to invite shame and ridicule, and Georgie has been told her entire life that she needs to be quieter, softer, smaller. Somewhere, Gerard Keay draws attention to himself and is shoved into a rapidly expanding sinkhole to see if feeding it will make it close back up. Somewhere else, Melanie King is loud and sharp and uncompromising and winds up with a broken jaw and three bruised ribs in the alley behind the Tesco at 4:00 AM. But that's not important right now. Jon and Georgie have never needed to learn by doing.

Time passes, naturally. Jon finds he is actually very good at research and writing when it's something he's interested in. Georgie finds more and more people who like her without any caveats, without any performances. The external world begins to validate them and each night when they come in the door they bring less of the desperate snarling animal of childhood with them. They grow up and they grow together and what once was kindling they use to build lifeboats. Maybe they're a little kinder for not being constantly in survival mode. Maybe they're a little crueler for having someone to fall back on.

Maybe Jon smiles at Sasha the first time she offers to help him with a research project instead of taking it as a critique of his abilities. Maybe he's sharper in his criticism of Martin when he's spent an hour texting Georgie his frustrations and receiving a steady stream of sympathetic irritation and validation. Maybe none of this really matters, in the long run. Very few butterflies truly cause tornados.

Maybe on her first day in London Georgie almost trips over a guy sitting on the sidewalk outside their new flat, the flat they can only afford on two salaries, hands pressed to his temples. Jon would have glared and went on his way. Georgie asks if the man is alright.

He's not, but neither of them know it at the time. But the next time Gerard Keay is in A & E for an injury he can't treat on his own and the nurse asks if he has any other concerns, he remembers the random woman who had almost fallen over him, and he remembers "That really doesn't seem normal, mate, you might want to see a doctor, yeah?" And maybe he mentions the pseudo-blackouts and the head aches and the memory issues. Maybe, in a kinder world, the doctors find Gerard's cancer in time.

When Jon gets promoted to Head Archivist he knows he doesn't deserve it. He knows he is prickly and condescending and unnecessarily distant, he knows that the dismissive scepticism with which he dissects each statement is likely undeserved, but he has been thrust into a position in which he must convince everyone he belongs. He has to be professional. Friendship is not professional, no matter how awkward it is to reject offers for lunch or drinks or coffee runs that he would have accepted at least half the time in the past. Believing in the supernatural is not professional, even if he and Georgie have both experienced it and he spends many evenings researching stories for What the Ghost that have no credible explanation. He wears suits and ties like ill-fitting, heavy armour, stifling and wrong but the only practical defence against injury.

Melanie and Jon meet just as she's leaving the flat and he's entering, and it is a perfectly unremarkable, perfectly civil meeting. Jon doesn't particularly like her show, but he can respect the amount of work that goes in to it, and if Georgie is on friendly terms with her then he's got no reason to be otherwise. He may play the sceptic at work, but he's sat through too-loud parties and cramped road trips and endless editing sessions with what feels like all of the UK's supernatural media creators at one point or another, because Georgie wrote 'networking' on her very first business plan for the podcast and underlined it with a grim sort of determination.

Melanie comes in to make her statement and Jon is professionally friendly and he leaves the door open while he hunts down the business cards with his direct line in case she remembers anything else.

"Sorry about him," he hears Tim murmur to Melanie, clearly assuming Jon's out of earshot or distracted. "Honestly, he wouldn't believe in a ghost if one punched him in the face."

"What, Jon? I doubt it. Wasn't he one of the ones who took that fucking school bus up to the middle of nowhere lake country? I swear I remember him and Georgie talking about the fucking demon sheep when they were hammered at one of the award shows' afterparties."

...which is how Jon's assistants start to suspect that he is not, in fact, a workaholic robot with no life. It's terrible.

"So how do you know Melanie?" Sasha asks, in what she likely thinks is a casual tone.

"I wouldn't go so far as to say I know her," Jon says coolly.

"I know why you don't come to the pub with us," Tim says, "we're just not high-profile enough."

"I assure you, that's not the reason."

Martin doesn't say anything, but then, Jon has text messages from Martin's number that he never sent, so he supposes the ship has rather sailed on convincing Martin of his disbelief.

He tells Georgie everything. He needs an objective viewpoint, one not constantly infected by the creeping, insidious fear that grips him each time he thinks about the Institute. Even when Elias reminds him about the NDAs and code of conduct he'd signed when he first started, as if Elias knows, somehow, that Jon is rambling everything out each night like leaving a backup copy of a hard drive in a locked box.

It's because he tells her everything that she's not even surprised when he calls her to pick him up after the fucking wormpocalypse. Which is good, because everyone else is plenty surprised enough. Tim has just gotten out of quarantine when she gets there, and the rest of them are standing around awkwardly, still a little numb from shock but silently agreed that they need to see Tim cleared and alright before they can leave.

"Christ, Jon," Georgie says, touching his chin carefully to tilt his face into the light of a street lamp. The bandages pull and he winces.

"Yes," he says. "It has certainly been... a day."

"Did you record it?" she asks, and probably someone else would look guilty for asking. Probably someone else would feel resentful for being asked.

"Parts," Jon says. "We can go through what I have at home."

"Hi," says Tim, pointedly. "I'm Tim, this is Sasha and Martin. I'd try to guess who you are, but Jon's never mentioned you."

Georgie rolls her eyes. Jon elbows her in the side. "I am trying to be professional," he mutters.

"Are you saying I'm NSFW, Jon?"

"I've changed my mind, I'll just go sleep in my office with the worm corpses."

Georgie introduces herself, friendly and engaging and easy like she always is when she's working. Jon stays quiet and tries not to throw up from the painkillers and the pain they aren't killing and also the image of the fucking worms, the memory of the soft give of the wall just before they rushed out, the way they'd burrowed under his skin like his body was a rotting apple, something already discarded and unwanted, just soft flesh waiting to serve a new purpose than the one it was meant for--

"I need to leave," he says, as quiet as he can manage. He can't feel his legs, and every time he moves his tongue inside his mouth it is wet and soft and squishes with an awful sound.

Georgie doesn't hesitate. Her hand on the small of his back is almost too much stimulation, but he knows without it he'd just float out of his body entirely.

It's not until they're half way home that Jon thinks to mention the dead body.

Weeks later, when his paranoia is almost crippling, Georgie grabs his wrists and makes him sit down on the sofa, crouching on the hardwood in front of him and holding his wrists firmly.

"Jonathan," she says. "You cannot stalk your direct reports because you think they're planning to murder you."

"I don't see why not."

She blows a breath between her teeth. "Because that is how you get arrested. Give me a couple days to talk to some people and I'll find a hacker so you can invade their online privacy like any self-respecting Millennial."

A few days after that, Michael traps Helen Richardson in its corridors and then decides to pay Jon a visit at work. Jon might have been frightened, or confused, or angry, if he hadn't had to put up with Georgie's constant theories about what Michael might be and if it has a crush on Sasha or just wants to lull her into a false sense of security. It's gotten bad enough that every time Georgie loses her keys or sees one of those optical illusions on the internet or notices a door painted yellow she'll call out "Hi Michael!" like it's some sort of meme that only she and Jon understand.

"Hi Michael," Jon says, before his brain can catch up with his mouth.

Michael stops, as much as something that is constantly something else can stop. "...Hi Archivist," it says, and if Jon were to think it could express emotion he would call it bemused.

"Shall I get Sasha for you?"

"That's likely a more difficult offer than you think. Besides, Archivist, I've come to talk to you."

"Hmm," says Jon. "What, is the world ending? Am I the only one who can stop it? Am I your only hope?"

Georgie made him watch Star Wars. It was not a particularly enjoyable experience, but he's tired and he can't find the energy to properly interrogate Michael.

Michael is behind him, then he is the window, reflected in a hundred fragmented pieces, then he's sitting in the same chair Helen had been sitting in not five minutes before. "You're not the only one," he says, "but you've got a good chance. Also, I have someone you should meet."

"I'd rather not," Jon says.

"I'd rather not plenty of things," Michael says. "Or-- well, maybe that's passed tense. It's hard to say. But it seems only fair, one of mine for one of yours."

"What?"

Michael drops something on his desk, then it is back at the door-- the wrong door. Jon blinks furiously, and in the time it takes to open his eyes again Michael and the door are gone.

He looks at the thing on his desk. It's a torn out page of a pizza take-away menu, dated January 2029, and there's a phone number scrolled across the back.

Jon doesn't realize anything unusual about Helen's departure from his office until she steps out of a yellow door and isn't Helen. He's never even sure if it had been the moment she left his office when she'd been taken, but Michael's words come back to him and he thinks it was.

One of mine for one of yours.

"Do you know what fucking time it is?" says the person on the other end of the phone.

"no," says Jon, fumbling with the pack of cigarettes in his pocket and realizing it's empty. He can see Georgie through the balcony doors, hunched over a laptop at the kitchen table with giant headphones over her ears, and Jon had only stepped outside to have a smoke, though the collection of butts in his empty coffee mug tell a different story.

"Who the fuck is this?" the voice asks.

"My name is Jonathan Sims," he says. "A-- colleague gave me your number, and I'm not certain why."

"Thanks," says the voice. "I hate it."

The line goes dead. Jon calls back immediately. "Don't hang up," he says.

"Literally get fucked," says the other person.

"who are you?" Jon asks.

"Gerard Keay," he says. "And if you do that to me again I'll fucking kill you myself. Call back at a decent hour and maybe we can talk. Once I've had my coffee. And my spot of murdering an avatar of the Spiral. You know, the important morning rituals."

This is not what Jon was expecting, so he doesn't react quickly enough to stop Gerard Keay from hanging up on him a second time. That's fine. He's got permission to call back.

He stumbles in to the flat, and pulls the headphones right off of Georgie's head, which earns him a thoroughly deserved growl.

"Guess who I just spoke to," he says.

"No," she says.

"He might be a ghost, if that helps," Jon says.

Georgie slumps down onto the table. "I'm listening."

She is not as excited at the prospect of communicating with Gerard Keay as Jon thinks she should be, but she is at least curious enough to accompany him when he goes to meet Keay at the Costa by the Institute. Jon's wearing a denim skirt and thick leggings under a WTG shirt and a warm black raincoat that neither he or Georgie remember buying. He suspects Keay's associations with the Institute aren't good ones, and perhaps the more he can distance himself from his position there the better his relationship with him will be.

Georgie says, "Do you want to bring a notebook so you can doodle hearts and write Jonathan Keay in the margins?"

"Don't be ridiculous," he says. "His mother was physically and emotionally abusive, I suspect he'd want to take my last name to distance himself from her."

As it turns out, Gerard Delano (Née Keay) has a complicated relationship with the Institute, is a positive in cyclopedia of useful information, and flirts with both of them like its his job. Jon is smitten. Georgie is reluctantly charmed.

"I'd ask you out," Gerard says to Jon, the third time they meet, "but you're The Archivist. I've always said I won't get in bed with any of the entities, and I mean that literally too."

"Rude," Georgie says, because Jon is bluescreening.

"Look, I'm sorry, but I have some very hard limits."

It takes a month for those limits to go out the window.

It's Helen who rescues Jon from Nicola, and she does it after only four days.

"My girlfriend's girlfriend said I had to," she says, deliberately studying her fingernails. Jon looks, too, and regrets it. "Which is fine. Not as if I have anything better to do than rescue helpless Archivists from aggressive skin care routines."

"What... do you have to do that's better?" Jon asks, morbidly curious.

"Negotiating tenancy agreements," she says. "Michael says hi, incidentally."

He steps into a door and then he steps out a door and he's in his flat, Georgie and Melanie squished together on the floor between the bed and wardrobe, Melanie looking vaguely panicked while Georgie is very deliberately choosing not to cry. Jon's very familiar with the expression.

"Special delivery," says Helen. "Shipping and handling is free, but only on your first order."

Georgie makes a broken noise and crosses the room to Jon, patting him down like she's expecting to find him bleeding from some hidden injury.

"I'm fine," he says, which is a lie. "Those are my ribs, Jesus Christ, yes, congratulations, you've confirmed that they're bruised."

"I fucking hate you," she says, still not crying.

"I know," he says, and shoves his face into the space between her neck and shoulder so he doesn't have to deal with the world any more.

"...You smell like lavender," she says, after a long minute.

"My skin has never been so hydrated," he says, not lifting his head.

"Oh," she says. "Good. Great. That's... what the fuck, Jonathan?"

"So we'll just... go," Melanie says. "Well done not being dead, Archivist."

Jon doesn't respond. Helen's door creaks when it opens, then creaks again when it shuts. He can hear a steady clicking near his left ear.

"Really? You're texting someone?" he says, put out. "I've been traumatized, Georgina."

"I'm texting Gerry," she says. "People tend to get upset when they find out you've been kidnapped, it seems only polite to let him know you're back."

"...Hmm," says Jon, who is not used to anyone but Georgie caring about anything that happens to him.

They migrate to the sofa eventually, and Georgie makes coffee because Jon isn't sure of much but he is 100% sure he does not want to sleep any time soon. Gerry arrives at the same time the coffee finishes, because caffeine summons him like some sort of ritual sacrifice.

"Good news," he says, as soon as he enters.

"Yes," says Georgie. "Jon's not dead."

"well, obviously that's good news, but we live in the world of the 24-hour news cycle, Georgie, keep up. I've got something new, hot off the press."

"Go on then," she says.

"I know the secret to ending your employment contract with the Institute."

"I'm already worried," says Jon, dryly. "What, do we have to stab our eyes out?"

Georgie makes a face. Gerry says, "Well, I mean, stabbing seems a bit dramatic."

Jon says, "I've never put vodka in coffee before and I'm not sure if it will be awful, but I guess we're going to fucking find out."

**Author's Note:**

> Gerry: *banging on his closet door* MICHAEL WHY THE FUCK DID YOU GIVE MY NUMBER TO THE NEW ARCHIVIST?  
> Michael: I can't hear you, you're breaking up, I am a tunnel
> 
> Also. Double dates with Helen/Melanie and Michael/Sasha, no I will not be taking constructive criticism at this time.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] In a hallway where love's never been](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28549890) by [GoLBPodfics (GodOfLaundryBaskets)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GodOfLaundryBaskets/pseuds/GoLBPodfics)




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